B.E.L. Breaks Silence on Cyber Attack

The management of the Belize Electricity Limited held a press conference today to provide the media with a high-level overview on the infiltration of its information technology network by cyber criminals. John Mencias, the Chief Executive Officer at B.E.L., explained that the company carries out its operations on two separate systems.  The company’s IT system holds administrative data, while its Operation Technology system manages the monitoring and automation of its power grids. Between the end of March and the middle of May, Ragnar Locker, a ransomware company out of Russia, infiltrated the company’s IT system and extracted customer and employee data. At the end of June, the hackers demanded a ransom from B.E.L. in exchange for the data. B.E.L.’s management ignored the ransom email based on the advice of a cyber security company they hired to improve the company’s cyber security. But, last week, an email was sent to the C.E.O. in the Ministry of Public Utilities informing him that key data from B.E.L. was being circulated on the dark web. Attached to that email was evidence of the data. B.E.L. then confirmed that during the attacks, Ragnar Locker extracted approximately three hundred and thirty-five gigs of data.

John Mencias

John Mencias, Chief Executive Officer, Belize Electricity Limited

“On July thirteenth, 2023, the CEO in the Ministry of Public Utilities alerted both the CFO Sean and me. We were the only two. So he alerted us that he was informed by his regional partners of a data breach in BEL’s information system and he sent copies of the files that were leaked as proof. Our incident response team immediately confirmed that this was so, confidential employee and customer information was being shared on the dark web, not on the usual website that we were able to access and it was indeed website of this ransom ware operator, Ragnar Locker and again this confirmed our suspicions. The leaked file was evidence that the information was gotten from our file servers and our network and actually from individual computers assigned to employees. To share with you some of the information that was leaked, because we obviously got to that information to determine what was leaked. There was information on customer application form, ten thousand eight  hundred individual customer application form which contained identification information, SSB information, and some transaction details but no credit card number of bank number or anything like that.”